February 7 Thursday – Sam’s notebook: “Chas Fairchild 10 W. 8th—8 p.m.” [NB 44 TS 5].

At 1410 W. 10th in N.Y.C., Sam wrote to Oliver O. Howard asking for “good seats” for his wife and daughters for the Feb. 11 Lincoln Celebration night [MTP].

Judson Smith for the American Board of Commissioners wrote to Sam (in part here):

My Dear Mr. Clemens:

In common with multitudes in this country and elsewhere, I have a great admiration for your genius, and read whatever comes from your pen with delight. Your brilliant article, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” in the February North American Review will attract wide attention and exert a strong influence. Its keen, lightly-veiled sarcasm is well adapted to its purpose and will produce an effect quite beyond the reach of plain argument.

I observe that in commenting on affairs in China you select the Rev. Mr. Ament, D.D., one of our missionaries at Peking, to give your point of view, and that you base all you have to say of him on a single press despatch printed in the Evening Sun of December 24th, and that you assume the accuracy of this despatch as though it were Dr. Ament’s frank and full confession of deeds and motives. The arraignment is severe, the effect on Dr. Ament’s name and reputation must be very damaging. The prejudice thus awakened against the missionaries, mission work and the American Board is serious and likely to be of long consequence. …

You are too experienced an author to rest so terrible an accusation against a man whose reputation is as dear to him as yours to you, and who is engaged in missionary work on the other side of the globe, upon a single newspaper despatch. I wonder what other information you possessed, what inquiries you made concerning Dr. Ament’s record and of whom these inquiries were made. …

Assured of your good sense of fair play with highest regards… [William Scott Ament: Missionary to the American Board to China (1911) p.232-4].

Note: Source gives Feb. 8 for above letter; MTP gives Feb. 7 (which is correct, both of a first draft and a final copy in the file). Source states that Judson’s letter ran in “several newspapers” on Feb. 9. Sam wrote an answer to Smith on Feb. 12 but did not send it; the MS is partly lost.

Further, the despatch referred to in Smith’s letter was one which contained a blunder. From the above source:

Dr. Ament’s personal disclaimer as seen above was all that could be expected by cable. Laffan’s News Agency seems to have made haste to fulfill its part in confessing that the earlier despatch was “unauthorized.” Its correction appears in the New York Sun, February 20th.

“Owing to the cable blunder, the Sun’s despatch of December 22d was made to say that the Rev. Mr. Ament, of the American Board of Foreign Missions, had collected fines from the Chinese in various places to the amount of thirteen times the damages collected by him for the murder of converts and the destruction of their property. The despatch should have read that the fines were one-third in excess of the indemnities, making the difference something over a million dollars in the amount said to have been collected” [234-5].

Insert: Fred Lewis’ cartoon of a fighting Mark Twain as Huck Finn [MTB facing 1130]

On p.8, the New York Times weighed in Twain’s N.A.R. article

Certainly False, But Probably Funny

When Mr. Mark Twain with dauntless pocketbook withstood the extortionate cabman he climbed to a notable height of civic distinction, the loftiest his feet had ever trod. He had become a soldier in the war of liberation, and an enslaved community was grateful to him. He was invited to many public dinners and began to make speeches with great rapidity.

Flattered by the evident curiosity of the mob, Mr. Twain presently changed his tune from lively to severe, and astonished the town by repeated attempts at serious moral discourse—or at least so they seemed. Probably they were nothing of the kind. Probably Mr. Twain’s North American Review article on the shocking atrocity of our efforts to established a civil government in the Philippines is nothing of the kind. Our neighbor The Sun says, “Mark is on a spree; for the moment he is in a state of mortifying intoxication from an overdraught of seriousness, something to which his head has not been hardened.” Mr. Howells, in a study of Twain in the same number of The North American Review, and therefore before he could have known what the subject of his kindly appreciations was about to do, says that “what we all should wish to do is to keep Mark Twain what he has always been, a comic force unique in the power of charming us out of our cares and troubles”; also that this comic force is “united with a potent ethic sense of duty, public and private,” which shows that Mr. Twain’s dissembling has fooled even his critic.

If Mr. McKinley, grave and care-burdened man that he is, should send to The North American Review a reminiscent article entitled “Side-Splitting Stories from the Ways and Means Committee Room,” and Col. Harvey should print it; or if Mr. Cleveland, abating the native seriousness of his mind, should suddenly begin to write comic verse, the public might laugh, but it would be with counterfeited glee. So when Mark Twain, tumbling in among us from the clouds of exile and discarding the grin of the funny man for the sour visage of the austere moralist, forthwith starts in to lecture us about the things of state that have made all heads ache these two years, the result is neither fish nor flesh. It may be good red herring, but in such disguise that the old audience, which, as Mr. Howells says, thought itself liberal when it sometimes allowed this humorist to be a philosopher, will miss the familiar flavor.

Mr. Twain draws a grotesque picture of the Philippine transaction, true at no point and faithful in no detail, but he handles the brush with the air of an apostle teaching the Word and puts such a note of stern conviction into his castigations of those in authority that the reader off his guard, coming upon solemn preachments where he had expected provocations to inextinguishable laughter, would be in imminent danger of being deceived.

It is, in fact, very much as if Mr. Twain, catching up a yellow journal artist’s delineation of a courtroom scene during a murder trial, should exhibit it to an audience, swearing—on Bibles—that it was a Papal Consistory. Those who were deceived would be woefully deceived, indeed, and those who were actively disseminating deceptions would laud his picture extravagantly and so speed the error further on its way. The only cure we can recommend for those who have been taken in by Mr. Twain’s joke is to read with care the original authorities, the official sources, from which he would have it appear that he drew the information so amusingly perverted in his article. Then will the reader perceive that Mr. Twain’s picture of our relations to the Filipino insurgents, of their part in the military operations before Manila, of their nature and disposition, and of the beginning of their war with us, is a travesty of the truth, a reckless travesty we should call it if the presumption of comic intent did not exclude harsh judgments. It is a pretty heavy way to be funny, for a man who reads a joke wants to have his laugh the same day. Nobody can see the point of Mr. Mark Twain’s North American Review joke until with incredible labor he has read through two big volumes of Executive Documents. Then he begins to see that what has been called the swish of Mr. Twain’s lash is only the tinkle of the bells on his cap.

Nation ran an anonymous article, “Mark Twain on M’Kinley” p. 104-5. Tenney: “Editorial on ‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness’ in the February North American Review: ‘delicious though biting satire’” [34].